The Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Resolution:

This resolution may be cited as the "Dog Ate My Tax Receipts Resolution."

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Internal Revenue Service
(IRS) must allow taxpayers the same lame excuses for missing documentation that the IRS
itself is currently proffering

Whereas, fairness and Due Process demand that the American taxpayer be granted no less
latitude than we afford the bureaucrats employed presently at the IRS;

Now, therefore, be it resolved that it is the sense of the House of Representatives that
unless and until the Internal Revenue Service produces all documentation demanded by
subpoena or otherwise by the House of Representatives, or produces an excuse that passes
the red face test,

All taxpayers shall be given the benefit of the doubt when not producing critical
documentation, so long as the taxpayer's excuse therefore falls into one of the following
categories:

1. The dog ate my tax receipts
2. Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction
3. Traded documents for five terrorists
4. Burned for warmth while lost in the Yukon
5. Left on table in Hillary's Book Room
6. Received water damage in the trunk of Ted Kennedy's car
7. Forgot in gun case sold to Mexican drug lords
8. Forced to recycle by municipal Green Czar
9. Was short on toilet paper while camping
10. At this point, what difference does it make?

In any case, IRS can see the NSA for a good, high quality copy.

Jun 20, 2014:

The IRS targeting of conservatives: lost emails? (Right.)
Taxpayers just got handed a great excuse for not having records.

They can be cavalier, and freely compound their crimes given that
we have a Justice Department that has been thoroughly politicized and corrupted.

Jun 13, 2014:

Iraq: McCain was right, Obama was wrong.

We can argue that Bush never should have gone into Iraq. Saddam Hussein at least kept
everything under control. Bush should have taken his father's advice. Be that as it may, having started down a path
from which there could be no reversal of decision or do-over, once the mess was made (with the
blessing of Congress, recall), it's simply
not an excuse for the next administration to make it worse by not finishing the job.

Jun 07, 2014:

Stand Your Ground: the Law Of Self-Defense in 34 States
(vs. the 16 "Prove You Couldn't Somehow Escape Instead" States)

The ordinary common law of self-defense requires four elements, ALL of which must be
present, in order to justify self-defense. This is the law in the thirty-four (34) "Stand Your Ground" states:

(1) The person claiming self-defense must have been the victim* of an aggressor's attack. He
cannot have been the aggressor. [liznote]

(2) The threat being faced must have been "imminent", i.e. happening "right now".

(3) Proportionality of response. The person claiming self-defense must have been facing death or grave bodily harm (or
protecting someone who was), if his response used deadly force. A disproportionate response will turn the erstwhile "victim"
into the "aggressor", see #1.

(4) Reasonableness, both objectively and subjectively. The person claiming self-defense must have perceived
the threat the same way that a reasonable person in the victim's circumstances would have perceived the threat, AND
also must have been in actual fear.

In the
thirty-four (34) "stand your ground states", the above is the law of self-defense.
The prosecution must prove the absence of one of the elements,
all of which must be present for a successful claim of self-defense.
By contrast, in sixteen (16) states, there is an additional requirement
before someone successfully can claim self-defense, which effectively places the
burden of proving a negative on the defendant:

(5) Inability to safely retreat. There is a duty under certain circumstances (e.g. facing a threat
outside of one's home) that is placed on a person who is otherwise innocent to try to avoid violence before being
permitted to defend himself from an aggressor who is making a
deadly imminent attack.

The fifth element is not used in most states because
although it sounds like a nice peaceable idea to the naive, in practice it creates injustice.
In the calm of the courtroom, with a prosecutor concocting
theories of possible "avenues of retreat" that he took time to think about,
some of which may have been risky or not obvious to the
scared person under imminent threat, it may be impossible for the victim of aggression
to prove that he didn't realize he could have tried some avenue of escape
to "maybe" safely avoid having to use responsive violence. In addition, even when
a claim of self-defense ultimately would be successful, it not infrequently necessitates
subjecting the defendant to the financially and emotionally devastating harm
of a trial. That prospect
also results in convictions of those
who cannot afford to go through an entire trial to prove that they could not retreat, and thus
plead out.

The media consistently get the law wrong. There is no such thing as a "stand your
ground" defense that differs from ordinary self-defense.
It is not some novel law enacted in so-called gun-nut
states. California, e.g., was one of the first states to recognize that
placing the burden of proving no safe avenue of retreat on a victim of aggression is a very
bad idea. Moreover, it is not an expansion of "the Castle Doctrine", a distinct old common law with a different
rationale, with
somewhat different elements in different jurisdictions,
which allows a person in his
own home to use deadly force under certain circumstances against an intruder.

The foregoing is a summary of information from Andrew Branca, Esq., author of "The Law of
Self-Defense". There are nuances, of course. Branca's website is
at: http://lawofselfdefense.com/

[liznote] Often stated as "innocent victim of an aggressor's attack." The adjective confuses people and is mostly
unnecessary. It means, broadly,
things along the lines of "not the aggressor" or "not in the process of kidnapping the kid". It doesn't mean "she provoked him to
hit her" or "Zimmerman shouldn't have been following Martin".

Amen.

Operation Enduring Weakness

Elliot Rodgers

Misogyny? Guns? What prescription psychopharmaceuticals was the little personality-disordered
asshole fed during his childhood?. Let's also think about what the media is NOT yammering about: the uber-materialistic,
snobbish, woman-objectifying, pampered, no-responsibility, no interests, no-values, dragged-to-therapists,
anti-gun-but-World-of-Warcraft, sense-of-entitlement
lifestyle the boy was raised in. Or the joint custody -- which
the kid in his "manifesto" also stated that he couldn't stand. (And from
where -- in this cosmopolitan, globe-trotting multiculti lefty family and culture did he get his racist attitudes?) Ooops.

May 24, 2014:

Uh...

May 19, 2014:

Stand for Truth and Justice

May 18, 2014:

WTF is going on with the VA?

May 10, 2014:

What's a "Conservative"?
(You might be one and not know it.)

Mallory Factor, Professor at The Citadel, and author of Big Tent: The Story of the Conservative Revolution, explains
in the below video. There are several broad, sometimes politically conflictual branches of
conservatism in the U.S. today -- the neocons (who originally were FDR supporters, but veered away out of concern about communism
and continuing U.S. security),
the social conservatives, and the libertarians.

Notwithstanding their differences, however, and whatever their primary focus or interest, all conservatives still share four basic
convictions:

(1) A respect for the wisdom of past generations. Human history repeats itself,
and not all "progress" in the form of change for its own
sake is necessarily beneficial in the long run. Opinions about what change is beneficial will
differ, but everyone is a conservative in some ways.

(2) Maintenance of the "rule of law". This is the founding precept of the United States, and the United
States Constitution. Laws aren't always perfect, inasmuch as
they have to be applied to all kinds of differently-situated individuals, but the arbitrary, capricious, and/or
biased decision-making of dictators, monarchs, unchecked bureaucrats, and other officials is a danger that nearly everyone recognizes.

(3) Protection of individual rights and freedoms. Sometimes this is a legal balancing act ("Your right to swing your
arm ends at the tip of my nose".) Few people, however, would say that they aren't in accord with this. Some just differ on what
those "rights and freedoms" are.

(4) Belief in a law higher than man's law. Most social conservatives and evangelicals would say this is "God's" law, or the
law of the "Creator". Others would simply refer to this as "natural law", e.g. the right of a person to his own bodily integrity, or
the right of a mother to her baby. People may differ on just what these natural laws are, or how they are defined ("life, liberty,
property"), but nevertheless these "higher-than-man's-laws" are what are recognized by the Bill of Rights. They are the "laws"
that would exist in the absence of government. The Bill of Rights has been interpreted to constrain not just the federal
government, but also the states' formerly plenary sovereign powers over their citizens' security, health, welfare, and morals.

So if you consider yourself to be a leftist, liberal or progressive "in general", do you know what you mean by
that, and what or whose agendas, strategies, and steps on the road to "change" -- change of
what? progress toward what? "new" ideas about what? -- and ultimate goals (and iatrogenic effects)
you broadly and indiscriminately are endorsing?

May 08, 2014:

Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Lifting the Veil of Islamophobia

HARRIS: [The reason] you are at the AEI is that no liberal
institution would offer you shelter when you most needed it...
And ever since, your affiliation with the one institution that did take you in has been used to
defame you in liberal circles...

HIRSI ALI: Can anyone argue that women are
treated well in traditional Muslim societies? These various oppressions are justified using
the core texts of Islam: the Koran and the hadith...

HARRIS: Most liberals think that religion is never the true source of a person's bad behavior. Even when jihadists
explicitly state their religious motivations...

HIRSI ALI: People in the West are highly sensitive
to accusations of racism. In El Cajon, California, an Iraqi woman named Shaima Alawadi was beaten to death.
Beside her body was a note that read, "You terrorists, go home."
CAIR and other Muslim organizations pounced on it and started campaigning against
Islamophobia, marketing it as a hate crime... the husband was convicted of murdering his wife.
She had asked for a divorce... [R]easonable people need only look at the evidence.
CAIR and these other organizations have mission statements...

HARRIS: The Ku Klux Klan
and other white-power groups are a fringe phenomenon. But how many Muslims truly believe that apostates should be put to death?
Is it 300 million? Or is it triple that number? It's just a false comparison...
Remind our readers how you felt about Salman Rushdie when you were twenty.

HIRSI ALI: Everyone in my community believed that Rushdie had to die.
After all, he had insulted the Prophet. I believed that if you insult the Prophet, well, then you have to face the
consequences -- which means you have to be killed... I didn't make that up, of course, and
I didn't just get the idea from my friends; it came from scripture and from my religious teachers.
[What] so-called Muslim "extremists" [are] saying is fully consistent with the teachings of Muhammad...

HARRIS: But this is the core issue: The moderates can't reasonably claim to be representing Islam because
the faith has no truly moderate wing. There's no branch of Islam that says, "Say whatever you want about our Prophet.
He's a big boy. He can take it!" Unlike Christianity and Judaism, every branch of Islam insists that scripture is infallible
and that apostasy is a serious crime...

May 03, 2014:

The Middle East Problem, a primer:

Apr 30, 2014:

Best explanation I've seen for what's wrong with Common Core Math:

The method that they are offering to avoid rote memorization or the mechanical method of subtraction
involving two digit numbers is actually more conceptually difficult than the memorization or mechanical...
method.

It is true that there is a mathematical insight in [for example] realizing that 13 is just 10+3, ...[thus permitting]
one to subtract 7 from 10 and then add 3.

But this is a higher-level, higher-conceptual-insight view of the problem.

Confronted with kids who aren't proficient with the low-level, low-conceptual-insight view of the problem,
they decide... we'll teach them the high-conceptual-insight method of doing it...

The mistake here seems to be the exact same mistake that these Professional Education Theorists made with respect to
reading. They realized that high reading ability kids weren't using Phonics to sound out words, but instead
were reading new words via the "whole word" method -- they were just looking at the word and saying it.

Well, one problem with that: The proficient readers had begun as Phonics readers, but then, having become adept at
reading, then began Whole Word reading only when they were reading at a near-young-adult level.

By attempting to treat the lower-level readers like the more accomplished readers, the educators stopped
teaching the lower-level readers the skill that the accomplished readers had used to become accomplished readers
in the first place... Phonics.

Similarly, it seems these people have realized that kids who have internalized the times tables and
arithmetic tables have, after a few years of fluency with them, noticed certain patterns and rules they could employ --
tricks, shortcuts...

And once again they are trying to teach lower-performing kids the tricks that higher-performing kids are using,
but skipping over the basic stuff that higher-performing kids had to internalize themselves to become higher-performing
kids...

Frankly, these tricks usually occur to someone when they understand the subject well enough that
they no longer need tricks at all. At least not to get the answer; but understanding the math,
they begin looking for faster (or at least different) methods of getting the answer.

I really do not get the idea being sold here that the way to make a kid who's struggling with math
understand math better is to teach him the insights that come from a deeper understanding of the material.

Understanding cannot be taught by rote, let alone by elementary school teachers who mostly likely
themselves are learning these "methods of perception" (not infrequently tantamount to fancy variations of finger-counting) by rote.
The forced mental shenanigans that give rise to the "tricks" and "shortcuts"
do not facilitate understanding themselves but are a manifestation of it: they
arise naturally and comfortably -- and individually -- after mastery of the basics
(once rote manipulations have become "second nature"),
and then are applied variably by different individuals in different contexts, depending on what works for the individual.
For example, one person habitually memorizes using
rhyming mnemonics, while
another visualizes a model (while yet another somehow
just "remembers" because he has so much related material already mastered and
structured
that retention of the new information is effortless). For example, one person rapidly subtracts 19 from a larger
number by subtracting 9 and then
10 (without consciously thinking about it), while another is mentally
subtracting 20 and then adding 1 (and yet another just "remembers" or knows because, like the multiplication tables,
the same or similar equation or numbers repeatedly have arisen and been used before). And so forth.

Apr 29, 2014:

Redux: Understanding Obama

Dinesh D'Souza talks about his documentary 2016: Obama's America and the anti-west perspective of
anti-colonialism. Obama did not grow up in the United States, and does not identify with America.

Mark Steyn --

The Slow Death of Free Speech

Dead-bang-on.

In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female,
atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women's
rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican party's 'war on women',
or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old Andrew Boltian
racism breaking free of its redoubt at the Herald Sun to rampage as far as the eye can see.

But when the snivelling white male who purports to be president of Brandeis (one Frederick
Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali's blackness washes off her like
a bad dye job on a telly news anchor.

White feminist Germaine Greer can speak at Brandeis because, in one of the more whimsical
ideological evolutions even by dear old Germaine's standards, Ms Greer feels that
clitoridectomies add to the rich tapestry of 'cultural identity': 'One man's beautification
is another man's mutilation,' as she puts it.

But black feminist Hirsi Ali, who was on the receiving end of 'one man's mutilation' and
lives under death threats because she was boorish enough to complain about it, is too
'hateful' to be permitted to speak...
Read the entire article at
The Spectator.

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